The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder.

Discipline and ascetisicm? It was the drugs, honey. CBS News recounts Obama’s “confessional” from autobiography one of two:

“Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it,” wrote Obama about what he would later say were “bad decisions.” “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.”